Culture ShockIt is extraordinary that President McAleese should wade into the Wiesenthal Center's allegations about the provenance of material in Limerick's Hunt Museum with emotive, high-octane rhetoric, writes Fintan O'Toole
We've known for some time now that, when it comes to the Holocaust, President Mary McAleese has rather a tin ear. Anyone who can compare, as she did in 2005, anti-Catholic bigotry in Northern Ireland to German anti-Semitism under the Nazis, must have trouble grasping the scale and horror of the attempt to exterminate an entire people. Given the embarrassment created by those remarks, however, one might have expected her to think carefully before she speaks on behalf of the nation on subjects that touch the legacy of that genocide. All the more extraordinary, then, that she should this week wade into the Simon Wiesenthal Center's allegations about the provenance of material in the Limerick Hunt Museum collection controversy with such emotive and high-octane rhetoric.
According to McAleese, the Wiesenthal Center made "base and unfounded allegations". But, she claimed, a report by the Washington-based art historian Lynn Nicholas, has shown them to be a "tissue of lies", delivered a "great vindication" to the Hunt family, and "laid the story completely to rest". The problem is that, as a summary of the affair, this is as wild and as unsubtle as the Wiesenthal Center's original allegations. It shows a deep misunderstanding of a real and sensitive issue - the moral responsibility of the art world towards the victims of the Holocaust.
The Wiesenthal Center undoubtedly made allegations that it has so far failed to stand up. (It promises a new report on the issue within months.) It claimed that John Hunt and his German-born wife Gertrude, whose collections formed the basis for the museum, attracted "British suspicions of their alleged espionage activity", and had "intimate business relationships with notorious dealers in art looted by the Nazis". He called for the museum to place descriptions of all its holdings on the internet to allow "eventual claimants scrutinise these objects in the manner of suspect art held by museums worldwide".
The first part of these allegations is highly dubious. The Wiesenthal Center has produced no evidence that the Hunts were Nazi sympathisers, let alone spies.
But this issue has not actually been investigated. The Royal Irish Academy's Hunt Museum Evaluation Group, charged by the Government with reporting on the allegations, dodged the issue, stating that "questions of the particular affiliation of two individuals, no matter how prominent, would appear after this lapse of time to be matters for the biographer or the historian rather than a State-funded enquiry such as this". Lynn Nicholas, in the subsequent report to which the President referred, judged this decision to be "misguided".
The second part of the allegations, however, raised entirely legitimate questions. The Wiesenthal Center was right to demand that the collection be placed on the internet - as the evaluation group, Lynn Nicholas and the Hunt Museum itself accept, and as has been done. And it wasn't "base" and "mean-spirited" to demand an investigation into the provenance of items in the collection. Lynn Nicholas couldn't be clearer on this point: "An examination of the Hunt Museum Collection was certainly justified both by its lack of provenance records and by the discovery of the Hunt's relationship with a dealer who is known to have trafficked in confiscated art." That dealer, Alexander von Frey, was based in Lucerne during the war. He was personally close to the Hunts and was directly and indirectly involved in the trade in art objects stolen by the Nazis from Holocaust victims. The Hunts also had dealings with Arthur Goldschmidt, who dealt in looted Nazi art, and with Felix Habord, who was in charge of a major British depot for stolen art from which large numbers of works mysteriously disappeared.
None of this proves anything. As Nicholas concluded "the presently available information and research provides no proof whatsoever that the Hunts were Nazis, that they were involved in any kind of espionage, or that they were traffickers in looted art". But the words "presently available" are deliberately chosen. This is emphatically not a story that has been "laid to rest".
We simply don't know how the Hunts acquired the works in the museum. As Nicholas puts it, "For most of the objects in the collection, there is essentially no provenance at all . . . There are no dates of acquisition, receipts, or invoices . . . Highest priority should, therefore, be given to continued provenance research." That research may possibly "reveal that objects in the collection are from confiscated collections".
Raising such questions is indeed deeply painful, especially to a family whose generosity in leaving the collection to the public was so marvellous. But this pain is a legacy of European history, and we can't simply absolve ourselves from it. For the President to do so on behalf of the State is especially regrettable since the State itself is partly responsible for this mess. Nicholas revealed that both Virginia Teehan, director of the Hunt, and her predecessor, Ciaran MacGonigal were deeply concerned by the lack of provenance for objects in the collection. But, she says, "the constraints of a tiny staff and little funding" made the necessary work impossible. Instead of simply blaming the Simon Wiesenthal Center for raising nasty questions, the State should accept its moral responsibilities to genuinely close this uncomfortable chapter in Irish cultural history.